I rode in the Park Thursday morning and got fifteen miles.  I launched just after five, not in order to get more miles, but to get more pictures of birds.  I’m a bird paparazzi, but I am not alone.  You can read below about my partner and co-conspirator’s exploits, but this is not just a family affliction.  Pictured with this post is a pair of bird paparazzi with really big guns.  They’ve been staking out this one waterhole for about a week or two.  I’ve tried to engage them, but they are not nearly as ebullient as the owl guy that I met in the spring.  He hasn’t updated his blog since April, but yep that’s me in the picture.  Their approach is to sit and wait.  With the size of their cameras, I don’t see that any other strategy is possible.  My strategy is to bop about on my bike, visiting the many waterholes about the Park, looking for birds.  Thursday morning, I struck gold.  Pictured above is a Great White Egret facing off with a Great Blue Heron.  Not pictured was the pair of Yellow Crowned Night Herons that I flushed while taking that picture.

The RegenAxe northern correspondent sent the following text along with some pictures:

Tuesday we went to town and did laundry.  There is wi-fi at the Laundromat downtown, and the service is called Wash Some Clothes.  We did, then did the shopping and returned to the cabin.  It was another gorgeous day with an off shore breeze.  Wednesday, I looked at the map and decided that Rudyard was not too far, if I got started in the morning instead of three in the afternoon.  When I got to Rudyard, I was going to take a picture of my bike in front of the Rudyard Co-op, since Mark and I had stopped there on our big bike trip in 1982.  Another shopper came out and offered to take the picture, so I could be in it.  He also told me about another route back to Brimley.  Here is the picture, complete with helmet hair.  You can see the bananas I purchased at the Co-op.  I then went over to the City Park by Old US 2 and ate lunch.  I returned by Thompson and Bound roads, and got a total of thirty-eight miles.  I also got back before it rained, although we only got a sprinkling of rain.  I’m also sending a couple of pictures of sand hill cranes, but it will be up to the head bird paparazzi, (or is it paparazzi bird brain?) to see if they are up to his high standards.  [There were ten in the flock, but constraints on the size of the header reduced that number.]